Dave Salmoni is an animal lover, and if you doubt it, you need to see what he goes through in his new show premiering Thursday on Animal Planet, “Into The Pride.”

For the show, Salmoni spent six months living in a tent in the Erindi Private Game Preserve in Namibia working with a pride of lions. If that doesn’t sound like much of a challenge, add in the fact that these lions don’t like people, including Salmoni, and if he doesn’t find a way to change that situation, the lions will be killed.

Erindi is giving the problem lions one last chance, but if they continue to charge jeeps full of tourists, their fate is sealed. And that’s where Salmoni comes in.

“There’s no such thing as a problem lion, just a problem situation,” he said.

And as he told the Animal Planet execs, he was the only man for the job.

“I told the network, ‘There’s nobody else on the planet that has my background and my skills that can help these lions. If I do it right, these lions are going to live and if I do it wrong these lions are going to die,'” he said.

It may seem noble or very crazy, but for Salmoni this trip was a personal journey of rediscovery.

Focusing on his TV career took Salmoni away from his passion. Being a hot property makes it hard to switch off your cell and go live by yourself in the bush. But Salmoni wanted to prove to himself that he could still do it.

“I wanted to figure out if I was still the same guy I was when I started. Am I still the guy that can handle being by himself in the bush in a tent? Am I still the guy that loves animals enough to go through all this hardship?” he said.

As a youngster growing up in Sarnia, Ontario, Canada, Salmoni daydreamed of being around wild animals.

“I remember thinking if I could ever once touch a wild animal it would be my life, done,” he said. “But I didn’t consider it as a career path until I was 22 years old.”

Now 31, Salmoni gets to live his dream of interacting with wild lions, but in his dreams the lions didn’t hate him like the ones in Erindi.

“I thought the lions would be the easy part and I tried all the usual techniques and six weeks in, which is all it took me the last time, these lions hate me more than they did before. And they were learning to hate me. They’re not learning to like me,” he said.

For Salmoni, unless it came down to a life choice, he was not going to give up, even though many times the thought crossed his mind.

“The first night I was ready to quit,” he said. “The passion drives you forward. And every time you have a bad day you think ‘I can’t do this. I’m gonna die. I shouldn’t be here. This is never gonna work.’ It’s like a Sudoku puzzle. Okay, this didn’t work, let’s try something else.”

As a scientist and an animal trainer, Salmoni knows how bright lions are and was willing to push the limits to get them to learn what he was trying to teach.

“We don’t have a measuring device that says lions are brilliant, because they’re not brilliant like us, they don’t add, they don’t have language, at least not the way that we do. But if you watch them learn [their] ways, watch them access a threat, watch them access what might be food, watch them access their surroundings, they’re better than any animal out there,” he said.

But for whatever reason these lions weren’t at all interested in learning from Salmoni. And again he had doubts.

“Maybe I will never get to that end goal. You don’t see where I’m trying to drive you, but when I get you there you’re going to be happy and healthy your whole life. But they didn’t know that, they just thought I pissed them off,” he said.

“For me, the passion is in the relationship with the animal. You can build relationships and it’s a two-way street. And it’s that possibility of that relationship and it’s the building of that relationship that interests me in driving forward. You just keep trying until something gels and something works and then once you get their momentum, cats are brilliant,” he said.

Did Salmoni succeed in getting back to basics and showing himself he can still do it and did he ever stop pissing off the lions? You’ll just have to tune in and see.